c environment within large, inner-city ghettos. From this perspective, the resulting political "war on drugs" has been nothing more than a party struggle-- different belief systems maintain different values about drugs in our society, and these views become food for political battle in this new arena that politicians can rally the rest of America to watch. While economic power has probably played a role in overdramatizing the crack problem, Reinarman and Levine's assertions may be assessed from a medical sociology perspective as well. Consider, for example, how politics have influenced medical technology over the last few decades. Structural hierarchy has dominated the discipline, and laws concerning which drugs shall be deemed legal or illegal have been at the playful hands of medicine for much of this time. As Reinarman and Levine do point out, the government was able early on in this "war against drugs--" to appropriate the results of medical to study to demonstrate an enhanced societal impact of crack. Analyzing their article from the medical model, it seems quite clear that the medical technology was but another sector of power manipulated by government to influence society into believing in a certain image of crack. Most applicable to the Reinarman and Levine article, however, is the general model of social psychology. Through its exaggerated rhetoric and lies that played upon America's racist outlook, the government provoked Puritans and Symbolic Crusaders alike to find some large, overdrawn meaning (cause and effect) of the crack problem. Consequently, under the Puritan deviance model, some were made to fear drugs more than ever before one the crack "epidemic" was blown out of proportion. Similarly, the 'crusaders' were given something new to symbolize their struggle. Now they could more rightfully label inner-city minorities as delinquent animals and fight to change the wrongs of society just as prohibitionist...
